Sunday evening, 29-year-old Dante Lynn Hogans was at home in Indianapolis, making homemade pizzas and baking chocolate chip cookies for his wife, Keiona, and their 5-year-old son, Amir. Just hours later, the devoted husband and father would be caught in a wave of violence beyond his control, his life ending in a mass shooting—and initially, the world would be told a devastating lie.
The tragedy unfolded in the early hours of Sept. 21. Around 2:15 a.m., shots rang out in the 6800 block of Shore Terrace on the city’s northwest side. Authorities say the mass shooting left two men dead and at least five others wounded, among them Hogans—only he wasn’t one of the gunmen.
In the immediate aftermath, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police identified Hogans as one of the shooters. The error shocked his family, who knew him as gentle, kind, and entirely devoted to his loved ones. But after investigators reviewed evidence and witness statements, it became clear: Dante Hogans was an innocent bystander.
Keiona Hogans said her husband was “a man who always put his family first.” To their friends and neighbors, he was hardworking and reliable, holding a position as a warehouse operations specialist at Cardinal Health. His family remembers the small, caring moments—the meals he cooked, the cookies he baked—as the truest reflections of who he was.
The grieving process has been made all the more painful by the task of correcting the public record. Hogans’s family has had to contend with misinformation—first being told he was a perpetrator, then reclaiming his story as a victim of the violence. “He should still be here today—taken too soon by senseless violence,” they say.
Police continue to investigate the circumstances of the shooting. Two men—Rodney Allen Taylor, 38, and Dante Lynn Hogans, 29—were initially pronounced dead at the scene; that statement included Hogans by name, but later clarified to correct the misidentification.
As the city grapples with yet another weekend of gun violence—this one involving 15 people shot over several incidents—Hogans’s story stands out: not only for its tragedy, but for the way truth had to fight to be known. His loss, and the way he was misnamed in death, underline how much more than statistics are lost in these moments—and how important it is to remember the persons behind the headlines.